To Darek and F Dot: About group permissions, there is this note in the php.ini file:; By default, Safe Mode does a UID compare check when; opening files. If you want to relax this to a GID compare,; then turn on safe_mode_gid.safe_mode_gid = Off

It appears that is_writable() does not check full permissions of a file to determine whether the current user can write to it. For example, with Apache running as user 'www', and a member of the group 'wheel', is_writable() returns false on a file like

We have two servers: one running PHP 5.0.4 and Apache 1.3.33, the other running PHP 4.3.5 and Apache 1.3.27. The PHP 4 server exhibits the behavior you are describing, with is_writable() returning 'false' even though the www user is in the group that owns the file, but the PHP 5 server is returning 'true.'

Regarding you might recognize your files on your web contructed by your PHP-scripts are grouped as NOBODY you can avoid this problem by setting up an FTP-Connection ("ftp_connect", "ftp_raw", etc.) and use methods like "ftp_fput" to create these [instead of giving out rights so you can use the usual "unsecure" way]. This will give the files created not the GROUP NOBODY - it will give out the GROUP your FTP-Connection via your FTP-Program uses, too.

This is the latest version of is__writable() I could come up with.It can accept files or folders, but folders should end with a trailing slash! The function attempts to actually write a file, so it will correctly return true when a file/folder can be written to when the user has ACL write access to it.